Devil's Food Cupcakes with Chocolate Ganache

Testing my skills in the kitchen again. This time, the recipe: Devil’s Food Cupcake with Chocolate Ganache Frosting, from Martha Stewart’s Cupcakes book.  It looked absolutely delicious, and I had a craving for chocolate – then again, when don’t I?

Chocolate ganache is a decadent chocolate frosting that looks utterly delicious.

For once, everything seemed to go smoothly, cupcake wise. I think I got that down pat! Yay! The cupcakes ended up being wonderfully moist and chocolatey – the absolute perfect cupcake.

Then came the icing. Isn’t this where I go wrong a lot? I followed the directions – they were surprisingly simple. I did almost take my finger off when I was 'finely-chopping' my chocolate. But, me + very large knife = never a good idea.  For the most part, the instructions were mostly: chop chocolate, boil heavy cream, pour heavy cream on chocolate. Then a little tricky part where I had to stir it a lot and refrigerate it to cool, and stir every five minutes until it "thickened."

I stirred and cooled and stirred and cooled. Did it thicken like Martha said it would after 30 minutes? No. Did it thicken after 120 minutes? No.  Once again, I had frosting soup. Really chocolatey frosting soup.  I decided to let it refrigerate overnight and hit the internet to find out any more info on chocolate ganache.
(For the record, the recipe linked has all the same components but the instructions read differently than they do in the recipe book.)

This site here gave me some helpful insight on ganache. They suggested just whipping it with cold beaters and a cold bowl! So easy, right!?

Out came the ganache and my hand mixer. And as I mixed, I watched my ganache soup turn into lovely, fluffy ganache frosting. Oh yea, definitely easy-peezy lemon-squeezy!

 Ganache unwhipped/glazed

Ganache whipped

As the ganache seemed to be holding its shape, I put it into a frosting bag and decided to test out my decorating tips I have. It was fun, until I realized that my ganache wasn’t as smooth as it should have been. Bits of chocolate were still in the frosting (which made it incredibly delicious and rich, but wrecked havoc on my tips.) The smaller tips had problems getting clogged with chocolate chunks, and I exploded two frosting bags before I learned my lesson. Ganache doesn’t taste as good in your hair. Or your eyebrows.

My taste-testers – forced PennDOT guys to eat my cupcakes, the horrors! – all loved them; they were gone in a day! They asked for something with a little less chocolate next time, though.

All the recipes I use can be found in Martha Stewart's "Cupcakes" book, or on her website: Chocolate Ganache Frosting and Devil's Food Cupcakes!